Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday August 28, 2013 @03:27PM
from the we're-gonna-need-a-bigger-boat dept.

Lucas123 writes "Marine biologists from OCEARCH, a non-profit shark research project, have been tagging scores of great whites and other shark species with an array of wireless technologies, gathering granular data on the sharks over the past year or more. For example, Mary Lee, a great white shark that's the same weight and nearly the same length as a Buick, was tagged off of Cape Cod and has made beach visits up and down the U.S. East Coast and Bermuda. She came so close to beaches that the research team alerted local authorities. The team attaches an array of acoustic and satellite tags as well as accelerometers to the sharks, which collect more than 100 data points every second — 8.5 million data points per day. The data has provided a detailed, three-dimensional view of the shark's behavior, which the team has been sharing in real time on its website. OCEARCH plans to expand that data sharing over the next few weeks to social networks and classrooms."

I guess that Shark Psychology is not a subject thats been studied much due to the intractability of the subjects and difficulty of objectively assessing their actions. Is it at all possible, however, that either by electromagnetic or psychological effects the tagging of a shark changes its behaviour? It strikes me that all the data discussed in the article is info about sharks that have been tagged by people.

People? Under what rock have you been hiding for the last 10 years or so? It's called a cellphone, nowadays it's even worse with a smartphone, always on, any app can query the wifis nearby or even the GPS...

It's like convention goers at Vegas cruising the all-you-can-eat buffets..."I don't like the quality of mammals at this beach, honey, they taste too gamey. How about we try that cozy little cove over there instead?"

Think of all the disasters that the research team averted by alerting authorities that a shark was close to the shore! It would have been a blood bath for sure!

You think that is the only Great White shark that is patrolling the East Coast? You think that they have tagged all the Great White sharks that patrols the East Coast? I'm sure many untagged Great White sharks came close to beaches along the East Coast that authorities and beach goers are unaware of.

I think it's amazing how far-ranging the sharks are. It's interesting that it swims in a wide circle that includes Bermuda. How did it navigate to the island? How did it find its way back to the mainland? I would have expected a much more meandering course, but it's almost like it made a bee-line for it and then another bee-line back to the coast, but in the opposite direction.

Hi Ovidius,
Sysadmin here for http://sharks-ocearch.verite.com./ [sharks-oce...verite.com] I'm so sorry for the congestion. I've brought some extra capacity online just for you, and the site is becoming responsive again.
If you could just let me know how many friends you'll be bringing to site that would be great;)

The site is currently running in Rackspace's datacenter in Chicago. The beautiful thing about the cloud is if there's more traffic than usual you can just spin up more server instances. Not to say the site is designed for any kind of scale, but fortunately the site data is fairly static, so I can fake scalability with some ugly rsyncs:)

You should be able to sponsor a shark like "Save the Children. And definitely have ads on TV asking for sponsors.;) And shark rally racing. Pick your shark and if it travels farthest in a specified time window, you win. Hmmm, that could be legit enough you could register it with the state as parimutuel betting.

I've been looking for an excuse to use http://www.twilio.com/ [twilio.com] for a while now. How about instead of text messages I have twilio call you and tell you about the shark situation in its creepy robot text-to-speech voice?

Most of those locations [verite.com] appear to be near the shore, only if you define "near" as "within a few miles".

However, I did notice rather a lot of dots clustered around Mossel Bay, South Africa [wikipedia.org], including one that was so close that I could still see it on the map when zoomed in close enough to see individual houses. Yikes!

I think the explanation is probably the Seal Preserve there. Seals are known to be the Great White's favorite food. After seeing that, if it were me, I'd consider avoiding any beach that has

These guys were in a documentary series "Shark Wranglers", shown a while back on cable. They were hand tagging sharks on a platform, after hooking them on line with a large hunk of smelly fish on the hook. Cool dudes doing pretty cool work.

Other tags include an RFID implant whose ping is picked up whenever the shark passes a special, underwater buoy

As usual, science journalist make up stuff. There's nothing on the ocearch.org about RFID, because these ID tags don't use RF. They are acoustic tags. The popup dorsal fin transmitter uses RF, but only when it's above the water. Radio waves do not penetrate salt water far enough to be of any use.

There is one dangrously close to Cape Cod beaches right now! [verite.com] Quick, call the authorities! Please disregard the fact that 99.99% of sharks is not tagged and there is a number of them near beaches at all times.

I don't know what size a Buick is having never seen one, being from 'the rest of the world'. Can we have a metric equivalent? Elephants, Panda, London Bus, Eiffel Tower, anchovy, red kidney bean, Austin Ambassador (British Leyland Princess, Y reg).
Thanks